Thoughts of a Vagabond

Toe Printed

dearoldlove:

I hope your new girlfriend discovers my toe prints that you still have on your windshield from one of our wild nights together.

I definitely have toe prints on my windshield.

4th Time's A Charm

Back in high school, I was dropping off my friend, Emma, home one night. My car started shaking and made a terrible noise, so I pulled over. I inspected the problem and quickly realized it was my (first) flat tire. Luckily, my parents always had a AAA membership. I reached for my cell phone inside the car, and she asked me what the problem was. I told her that it was a flat, that I was calling AAA, and that I’d have her home shortly.

She started laughing. Confused, I asked her to elaborate. She asked me if I seriously didn’t know how to change a tire. Seeing as how I didn’t even have my own car yet (we were in my mother’s), I didn’t see why I needed to know such things. She grabbed my cell phone and proceeded to loosen what little was there of my manhood with every lug nut she unscrewed and every turn of the jack.

Since then, I’ve had two flat tires. Both times, I was by myself, and both times I elected to call AAA because I still hadn’t bothered to learn. Yesterday, I got another flat tire. And today, I decided enough is enough. I consulted a couple YouTube videos and a couple message boards online, a post in which had diagrams from the car’s manual. (That would’ve been a good place to start, no?) I went outside to my car and read the directions through and through. Twice.

It was raining, but I wasn’t going to let that stop me. Almost an hour, consulting the manual again and again after every step, and plenty of elbow grease later, I’m proud to say that I did it. I have never felt so accomplished in my life.

I am officially a man.

Dear barely-teenage douchebag who almost got in a wreck with me and 2 other cars,

You are a guy. In a yellow VW Beetle. Since you have proven yourself to be thick-headed, let me rephrase: you have a penis and, yet, drive a vagina car. You probably still don’t understand, so allow me to use words within your intellectual realm. You are not cool. Driving recklessly (twice the speed limit!) and illegally passing cars do not change the fact that you have acne and no hair on your balls yet. They also do not hide your poor taste in cars or that excuse for a hairstyle. If you still insist on holding steadfast to complete disregard for others and being sophomoric, I urge you to end your existence as soon as humanly possible.

-A

P.S. Tell your mother she should’ve hugged you more.

iRant

I will never buy an iPad.

It’s a glorified piece of shit. Yeah, it’s gorgeous and all, but, at the end of the day, it’s useless. I can already do on my iPhone and/or MacBook Pro what the iPad promises to do “better.” Moreover, there’s a laundry list of things the iPad ought to be able to do, but for whatever (and by that, I mean Steve Jobs) reason, it’s doesn’t. Here are some for starters:

• Make calls
• Take photos
• Video chat
• Support file types other than Office, iWork, and PDF
• Multitask
• Play Flash movies
• Have a hand-like accessory that plugs into the dock connector and randomly slaps the user upside the head (or punches the crotch if the iPad is detected to be in the user’s lap) for buying such a worthless product

And don’t even get me started on the absurdity of the pricing. Back in the day, you could use a rotary phone to call a friend for directions to the library. Then, computers came out, and you could look up the directions yourself. Then, Apple convinced you (and, to be fair, me too) to use their computers to do the same shit. Then, Apple convinced us we needed iPhones so we could look up the directions while we were out and about. Now, they don’t even want us going to the library…and they want to charge us $5-10 more per copy than other eBook providers. And there’s no guarantee the ePub standard will be around when you become a parent or grandparent, so you can’t pass down a favorite like you could with a leather-bound copy of Shakespeare’s complete works.

And that’s just eBooks. They also want us to buy music, “digital LPs,” TV shows, and movies from them…let alone all the apps for our iPhones/iTouches.

“So what?” you might ask. “I’ll dish out $500 for the base model. 16GB is all I need.” Let’s get real. It’s not enough to do jack shit. Fine, you’ll throw in another $200 to upgrade to 64GB, which is what the base model should’ve been to begin with. Well, what’s the point of paying all this money and being without Internet when you really need it? Well, Apple wants you to dish out another $130 for a 3G-equipped iPad. That’s just the hardware! Then, they want you to think 250MB of data for $14.99 is a fantastic deal. Tell me if that lasts you even a week-and-a-half. Clearly, you have to get the unlimited plan for $30, which is on top of the $130 you already paid for the hardware, which is on top of the $830 you already paid for the actual product.

And you thought you already went through all this shit when you got your iPhone.

So, in essence, you’ll pay anywhere from $500-700 for the iPad, depending on how much storage you want. Then, you’ll pay another $490/year for unlimited 3G from the nation’s most shitty network. You could buy another iPieceOfShit for that! Hell, by that time, they’ll come out with another iDevice that you’ll buy into, and you’ll be able to make an ExpensiveAndUtterlyUselessiSandwich that is so revolutionary that you’ll be able to do all the shit you already could. Instead of going that route, you could just use the $500 + $490/year and buy a damn notebook from Apple so you can do things comfortably.

What I’m saying is, we used to think PCs were more than enough. Then, we thought Macs were more than enough. Then, we thought iPhones/iTouches were more than enough. This is where I draw the line. We don’t need this.

And go to the damn library!

Love Is An Understatement

My grandparents celebrated their 47th anniversary yesterday.